Fire Strike 7/9 Read online

  Butsy gave the order to move out. We were pushing onwards towards our objective, four hundred metres further into enemy territory.

  Twenty

  AMBUSHED, SURROUNDED, TRAPPED

  We moved off on foot into the bush. It was 0500, and all around us the terrain was lightening, as the sun clawed its way over the hidden horizon. We’d lost the cover of darkness.

  The A-10s got ripped by a pair of F-15s, call signs Dude One Three and Dude One Four. Alan was warning us that the airwaves were going wild. Enemy commanders were yelling at their men that we were ‘coming in on foot’.

  ‘Hold your positions!’ they were ordering. ‘Hold your positions! Do not attack yet!’

  For forty-five minutes we pushed onwards into alien territory, in tense silence and alert to the slightest movement around us. One patch of bush looked pretty much like any other, but we were acutely aware that none of us had been this far east before.

  Butsy called a halt at a deserted compound, so we could take a breather and orientate ourselves. I grabbed my map and checked my GPS. We’d pushed east as far as Golf Bravo Nine Five, and our final objective was no more than two hundred metres further on. I was dying for a smoke. I stuck a fag between my lips and sparked up.

  A few metres away from me one of the 2 MERCIAN lads was busy re-bombing his mag. His fingers fumbled and he dropped a bullet. He bent to pick it up, and as he did so this flaming projectile came roaring through the window where he’d just been standing. It screamed over his back, tore across the space in front of me and slammed into the back wall. The RPG warhead buried itself in the mud-brick structure, exploded and smashed the compound wall to smithereens. As the choking cloud of smoke and dust cleared, the 2 MERCIAN lad was left sitting by the window, completely unharmed. As for me, my fag was in the dirt at my feet still smouldering away, but other than that I was perfectly all right.

  I picked it up with shaking hand and clamped it between my teeth.

  ‘Fookin’ hell,’ I muttered. ‘Dropped me tab.’

  The 2 MERCIAN lad shook his head and gestured at his ears. He was totally bloody deafened. But if he hadn’t stooped to pick up that bullet, the RPG round would have torn his head off and exploded right in front of me. He knew it. I knew it. And the two of us were left staring at each other with eyes like bloody saucers.

  We moved out and pressed onwards into the bush. A few minutes later a long burst of gunfire tore apart the tense silence. It was the rattle of an AK-47, and it was answered an instant later by an SA80. Suddenly, there were RPG rounds smashing into the bush all around us, as all hell broke loose.

  I dived for the cover of a ditch. Sticky, Throp, Chris and Jess landed next to me, as we tried to work out where the enemy were firing from. Then, an all-stations call went out on the company net:

  ‘Man down! Arsenic Two Zero, man down!’

  Arsenic Two Zero was the call sign of 2 Platoon, on point. We’d been ambushed at close quarters and the boys up front were getting smashed. I felt that horrible, sickening feeling of knowing we had a man lying out there somewhere in the bush injured or dying.

  ‘Get 2 Platoon’s fucking grid!’ I yelled at Sticky. I was having to scream to make myself heard over the battle noise.

  ‘Dude One Three, Widow Seven Nine,’ I radioed the F-15. ‘Sitrep: under assault. Contact is raging hot, and we have a man down. I need you visual with the lead elements of our patrol, so you can find the enemy fire positions. Stand by for grid.’

  ‘Roger. Standing by.’

  I scrabbled around in the pocket of my combats and pulled out my battered map. It was ‘Fabloned’ — coated in a plastic film — but still it had taken a real beating. I spread it out in the shadowed damp of the ditch. I tried to block out the battle noise and the red mist of anger, as I searched for our location.

  There would be time for rage and fury later. We had a man down, and we had to get him out. I glanced at my wrist GPS, and traced the coordinates on the map. We’d pushed so far east we’d fallen off the right-hand edge of my regular map — OP AREA 1 Ed2. I grabbed a second map, and found us. We’d gone beyond Golf Bravo Nine Six, with Golf Bravo Nine Seven to our south. Our objective, Golf Bravo Nine Eight, was a hundred metres to our front.

  Sticky cupped his hands and yelled the grid of the lead platoon in my ear hole. ‘5-9-3-6-8-2-1-9.’

  ‘Dude One Three, Widow Seven Nine,’ I screamed into my TACSAT. ‘Patrol is strung out between Golf Bravo Nine Six and Golf Bravo Nine Eight. Most forward grid is: 59368219. Readback.’

  The pilot confirmed the grid. He was having to yell to make himself heard too. ‘Visual muzzle flashes all around your lead platoon,’ he reported. ‘Enemy has your lead friendlies surrounded danger-close on three sides. They’re maybe ten, twenty metres away from your guys.’

  ‘Roger. Stand by.’

  What the fuck! My mind was racing. We had our point platoon surrounded to the north, south and east, danger-close. Fuck danger-close — it was ten metres away. There was no way on earth that I could use the air.

  ‘OC! Chris!’ I yelled. ‘2 Platoon is surrounded ten metres on all sides but our own. I can’t use the fucking air!’

  For a second the three of us stared at each other, as the full implications of what I’d said sunk in. Then the OC was on the radio.

  ‘Charlie Charlie One, all stations. Orders: full platoon assault to relieve 2 Platoon and extract casualty. Fix bayonets. Advance on my order.’

  It was the only decision to have made. We’d do a fighting advance to reach 2 Platoon, and get the casualty out that way. All around me there was the sound of steel blades rasping on steel barrels, as the lads slotted their bayonets on to their weapons.

  Nothing could ever bring home how desperate the fight had become more than the order to ‘fix bayonets’. When it came to hand-to-hand fighting at close quarters, the air was of no use at all. I gathered up my maps and shit and stuffed them into my pockets, then rammed the razor-sharp dagger of my own bayonet on to the barrel of my SA80.

  ‘Charlie Charlie One, all stations: platoon assault go!’

  Butsy gave the order and we surged out of the ditch. Chris took point as we pounded ahead in an adrenaline-fuelled charge, kicking through the dust and rocks ahead of us. As we surged, the section to our front put down a savage wall of fire on to the bush to either side.

  We charged ahead for fifteen metres, went firm, and started blasting away, as we gave cover for the section behind to come rushing forward. Up ahead the track hit a dense wall of trees strung with vines and thorns, and there it died. It was fucking carnage.

  We piled into a rat run, a stinking, shallow ditch full of God only knows what. We crawled along it on hands and knees, as the rounds tore across above. We hit a flooded section and we were up to our waists in thick, foul-smelling black water and shit. We struggled ahead, staggering over submerged boulders and rotten posts in the shadowed half-light. For fifty metres we fought our way forward, each step taking us closer to 2 Platoon and our casualty. And then we stumbled into a solid wall of fire.

  Rounds shredded leaves and branches all around us, and RPGs exploded on top of our position. In an instant I hit the deck, but I hadn’t done so voluntarily. I’d been slammed down like Mike Tyson had thrown his biggest ever punch at me. The impact had smashed me in the top of my back, hurling me on to my face.

  I came to my knees spitting out mud and dirt. It felt like a bloody great big mule had kicked me in the shoulder. I couldn’t figure out what the hell had happened. I wasn’t dead and no limbs were missing, or not that I could feel. I groped around the top of my body armour at the back, but I didn’t seem to be pissing out blood from anywhere.

  I shook the confusion out of my head, raised my rifle and started cracking off rounds. No time to worry about it. We were in the fight of our lives. I’d landed in a shallow ravine, and a storm of bullets was slamming over the top of us. All around me the lads were hunkered down in cover, and trying to return fire.

 
There was a cry on the radio net: ‘Man down! Man down! Arsenic Two Zero, two more injured! But still fighting!’

  Oh shit! We were three men down now. We’d stumbled into the mother of all ambushes, and we were getting smashed. I felt a desperate, insistent tugging on my left arm, the one that was cradling the front-grip of my SA80. It was Alan, the terp, and he was yelling something at me. I guessed it was a vital bit of Intel.

  ‘Bommer, we have to get out of here!’ Alan screamed. ‘The Taliban — they are everywhere! All around us! They will…’

  ‘Shut the fuck up!’ I yelled back. ‘Get a bloody grip, Alan. Get a grip!’

  His eyes were wide with fear. I didn’t blame the poor sod. He was a civvie, not a soldier, and this is what we had led him into.

  All of a sudden it went deathly quiet. One moment the enemy had been blatting away, the next they’d ceased firing. With nothing to aim at, our lads stopped shooting. The blue-grey smoke of RPG rounds and of burned cordite hung thickly in the air. We glanced at each other, wondering what the fuck was happening now.

  A cry rang out from the bush just to the north. There was an answering cry from the south. These were enemy voices, and they were moving past on either side of us. They would know every ditch and treeline here. As we blundered about like the proverbial bull in a china shop, so their fighters were slipping by unseen.

  This was the moment when they went to outflank and surround us. At the same time they were getting beyond danger-close with the patrol, so we couldn’t use the air.

  ‘Dude call signs, Widow Seven Nine: we have enemy all around us.’ For some reason I was whispering. ‘Tell me what you see.’

  ‘Stand by,’ the pilots replied.

  Then: ‘Dude One Three: I’m visual with at least a dozen enemy moving in from the north-east of your position. More coming from compounds to your north — all armed.’

  ‘Dude One Four: I’m visual with large numbers of pax moving in through the treelines. Your forward platoon is totally surrounded. They’re fucked.’

  I felt like saying Thanks for that, you dumb Yank twat. But instead, I passed the F-15 pilots the instructions that I never thought I’d hear myself saying as a JTAC.

  ‘Dude call signs, Widow Seven Nine,’ I rasped. ‘We’re in a Broken Arrow situation. Repeat: I’m calling a Broken Arrow.’

  ‘Affirm: you are Broken Arrow,’ the pilot replied.

  ‘Broken Arrow.’

  By declaring a Broken Arrow, I’d torn up the rulebook. Broken Arrow means friendly forces about to be overrun and killed or captured. It clears the fast jets to do whatever the JTAC asks, even if that includes dropping ordnance on their own men to prevent them getting captured.

  ‘I’ve called a Broken Arrow!’ I yelled to the OC. ‘I’m bringing in a danger-close strafe — like right on fucking top of us.’

  The OC gave me the nod. ‘Get ’em out, Bommer. Whatever it takes, just get ’em out.’

  We were deep in the shit and getting deeper by the second. We were hundreds of metres into the Green Zone, cut off from friendlies and surrounded. We had three injured lads, and we had no idea how serious they were. The OC had given me the word: whatever it took, we had to get our wounded men out of there.

  ‘Dude One Three: this is the grid of our most forward platoon: 59368219. Repeat: 59368219. That is the friendly grid. Readback.’

  The pilot confirmed the grid.

  ‘Attack instructions. I want a 20mm strafe to the north of grid, and I want it twenty-five metres from the friendlies. Attack run west to east. Confirm.’

  The pilot confirmed the attack instructions. Calling for a 20mm strafe at twenty-five metres from friendlies was pretty much bringing it in on top of our lead platoon. But I didn’t see that I had any options.

  ‘Banking around now,’ the pilot radioed.

  ‘Roger.’

  The OC mouthed into his radio headset. ‘Charlie Charlie One: all stations keep low. Jets coming in on strafing run.’

  I heard Chris repeat the warning. At the same time the OC, Chris and Jase Peach were frantically working the radios, trying to get the IRT launched and a Chinook in the air to evacuate our wounded. But at present we had no way of retrieving them, we were stranded deep in the Green Zone with no LZ, and we had a strafe coming in on top of us.

  I rolled on to my back and searched in the sky to the west. The F-15 would be coming in right over our heads — that’s if he’d got his attack run right. Anything else, and we were fucking dead.

  As I lay there, I thought momentarily of my wife and young Harry and Ella. God knows I’d miss them, but if I had to die anywhere, at any time, with anyone — then it would be here, in this fight, with these lads all around me. I’d rage and bleed and die for these blokes — every last one of them.

  ‘Tipping in,’ came the voice on my TACSAT.

  As the pilot spoke, I saw the glinting sliver of a knife-sharp jet arrowing out of the west and into the rising sun. The F-15 was coming in low and fast, and the pilot looked bang-on for the line of attack that I’d given him.

  ‘Visual two pax, crawling forwards on top of your lead platoon’s ditch position,’ the pilot told me. ‘Call for clearance.’

  ‘You’re clear hot. Ground commander’s initials are SB. Kill ’em!’

  The F-15 spat fire. ‘Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrzzzzzzzzzt!’

  It streaked right over us, the six-barrel cannon flaming, and threading the smoke from those muzzle flashes in a thick trail across the valley. In an instant it was past, the roar of the jet’s massive after-burners frying the air, as the pilot put pedal to the metal climbing for altitude.

  ‘BDA!’ I yelled. ‘BDA!’

  ‘BDA: two dead,’ the pilot replied. ‘Your lead platoon…’

  ‘Break! Break!’ Dude One Four crashed in on the traffic. ‘Widow Seven Nine: they’re running at you in large numbers from the northeast around to south-west of your position. Widow Seven Nine, they’re lookin’ to fuck you up bad down there.’

  ‘Well get the fuck in and start killing ’em,’ I screamed at him. ‘Get in and kill ’em, fast!’

  ‘Roger. Attack instructions.’

  At that moment, the predatory silence erupted. The bush sparked with muzzle flashes in every direction, as a savage barrage of concerted fire tore down on us, and RPGs flared in the shadows. I didn’t need Alan yelling intercepts at me to know what was happening: the enemy commander had given the word for the final attack.

  ‘Dude One Three, you have our friendly grid,’ I screamed. ‘No call signs will move position. Map it out on your computers, get your cannons going and start fucking smashing ’em.’

  ‘Roger. We’re lining up for attack runs now, shooter-shooter. Stand by.’

  ‘Dude call signs, you’re cleared to attack. Just get your bastard guns going!’

  The air above us was alive with the angry snarl of rounds. I felt a sharp tug, as one smashed into my donkey dick aerial, whining off into the undergrowth. If they took out the TACSAT, then we were well and truly buggered. I tried to burrow deeper into the shit and stench of the ditch. I was climbing inside my bloody helmet.

  ‘Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrzzzzzzzzzt!’

  The roar and thump of battle was torn apart by a long and beautiful strafe.

  ‘Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrzzzzzzzzzt!’

  A second came a few moments later, as Dude One Four followed after the lead F-15’s attack.

  From the skies above the kill zone it was raining chunks of redhot shrapnel. One landed smack-bang in the middle of the map, and lay there, smoking. I shoved it aside, hardly noticing the burning in my fingers, as I yelled for a BDA.

  ‘BDA: three killed,’ the lead pilot confirmed. Result. We were starting to smash them back. ‘Banking around now.’ A beat. ‘Engaging.’

  The F-15s came in again, shooter-shooter, smashing the bush to either side of us. An instant later a series of agonised, unearthly screams rent the air. Nothing on earth sounds like the cries of a wounded man, especially one
torn apart by 20mm cannon fire.

  I’d never had a hunger to hear that noise before. But now the enemy were taking casualties and those screams sounded good. The Dude call signs came arrowing in on two further strafing runs, but the enemy fighters just didn’t seem to care. They were blind to their casualties and closing in from all sides. The violence of the firefight was numbing.

  Along with the lads all around me I was pumping rounds into the bush, aiming with my needle-sight at the flash of movement, or the burst of muzzle flame in the shadows. But as one went down, another took his place. How many of them were there? And how long would our ammo last? And for how long could we keep beating the fuckers off?

  The chuntering of some big, nasty weapon joined in the death-fight now. Its deep, throaty thunk-thunk-thunk tore into our thin line of men, rounds smashing apart tree trunks and making mincemeat of the branches above us. It sounded like a Dushka, and the noise of those 12.7mm bullets tearing apart our positions was horrible.

  ‘Tipping in.’ Dude One Three’s radio call dragged my mind back to the air war. ‘Commencing fourth strafing run.’ A pause. ‘Engaging.’

  As the dense funnel of 20mm rounds thrummed through the air above, the second F-15 pilot came up on the radio.

  ‘Widow Seven Nine, Dude One Four: sir, this isn’t working. They’re charging your positions from the north-east, dozens and dozens of ’em. We need to switch to bombs, sir. If not, you’re finished.’

  ‘Roger. Stand by.’

  God, give me a few moments to fucking think.

  The patrol was strung out some two hundred metres from end to end. The enemy were right on top of us, danger-close in all directions. The danger-safe frag distance for a five-hundred-pound bomb — the smallest an F-15 carried — was three hundred metres. Basically, we were fucked if they started dropping bombs. But it was either that, or get captured and killed.